Hillel Halkin is a fine translator, an elegant literary essayist – and an inept political analyst. Unfortunately it is in the last capacity that he now dominates the pages of two important journals in the United States supposedly representing a vigorous defense of Israel’s rights and a tough-minded analysis of Israel’s enemies – Commentary and the New York Sun.

While Halkin is emphatic that he is not a member of Israel’s peace camp, the difference lies in tone, not substance. Unlike the peace camp’s intellectuals, most of them embittered self-styled “post-Zionists” (read opposed to Zionism and, often, Judaism) whom he vigorously criticizes (e.g., “Israel Against Itself,” November 1994), Halkin is proud of Israel and his Jewish heritage. He writes (May 1980) that “the idea of a Palestinian state alongside Israel in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not one that I contemplate with particular pleasure….and I fear that in relinquishing any part of Palestine I must relinquish a part of myself.”

Nonetheless, for the last thirty years, while veering wildly in his policy prescriptions, Halkin has been consistent in his underlying premise: Israel must give up Judea, Samaria and Gaza both because it is necessary for Israel’s welfare (a democratic Israel would be swamped by their huge Arab population) and because it is morally just (Palestinian Arabs have the right to self-determination).

What Halkin misses is the nature of the Arab-Israel conflict; indeed, reading Halkin’s essays, one would be hard put to know there was one. There is no discussion of the determination of the Muslim states of the Middle East to wage jihad against the Jewish state until its dissolution, no recognition that Israel’s existence constitutes a theological scandal to its neighbors who believe the proper role of Jews is as dhimmis. Halkin has swallowed the Arab propaganda line which, after the Six Day War, redefined the conflict (for Western consumption) as one between Israel and a newly discovered Palestinian people.

For Halkin, Jews are pitted against Palestinians in “a complex and terrible drama in which no one is totally right, no one totally wrong, and no one totally beyond sympathy or reproach” (May 1980). According to Halkin “No Solomon could possibly judge between these two claims.” But would such a judgment really be beyond the capacity of a Solomon? It is only because Halkin falsely treats the Arabs of Palestine as if they had no connection to the Arabs of neighboring states that he is unable to see what to Vladimir Jabotinsky was obvious seventy years ago: the claims of the Arabs were the claims of appetite (even more so today when the Arabs have 22 states) compared to the claim of starvation of the Jews, for whom this was their only national home—and at that time, in 1937, their only hope for survival. (Not until January 2004, “Beyond the Geneva Accord,” does Halkin finally take note that the Arabs of Palestine are “culturally, linguistically and religiously no different from Jordanians.”)

Turning a blind eye to the depth and nature of Arab hatred, Halkin comes up with a fantasy-formula worthy of Shimon Peres. He first advanced it in a January 1975 essay “Driving Toward Jerusalem.” Driving through the West Bank, Halkin engages in an imaginary dialogue between a proponent of Jewish rights to the Land of Israel and a proponent of returning the territories to the Arabs. But then the exchange takes an unusual turn. The advocate of Jewish settlement (clearly representing Halkin) is not a proponent of Jewish control. “I said that the Jewish people had an unconditional right to live in all of Palestine. I didn’t say anything about ruling there.” His erstwhile opponent says: “Now you’re confusing me. You mean that Jews should live in the West Bank as part of…” The Halkin stand-in replies: “A Palestinian state? Why not? There are several hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs living in a Jewish state today, and we accept it as a matter of course.”

The dialogue continues as Halkin fleshes out his proposal. Israel would return to the 1949 borders in the West Bank “without exception.” Yes, Arab Jerusalem would also go to the Arabs, says the Halkin stand-in. In the meantime, he says, settlement activities by Jews in the territories should be stepped up – the more Jews live there, provided everyone knows this does not entail Israeli sovereignty – the less likely the area is to become Judenrein in a peace agreement. By the same token any Arab would have the right to buy property in Haifa and Tel Aviv, though not to have an Arab government there. The borders would “remain absolutely open.” Halkin’s foil declares “So we’re back to the old bi-national state idea of the 30’s!” No, says the Halkin stand-in, that “was based on the utopian expectation that Jews and Arabs could share one sovereignty…now we’re talking about two distinct sovereignties, each of which will have to make certain inviolable commitments to the citizens of the other.”

The toughest objection Halkin’s foil comes up with is that “there will have to be a long process of gradual reconciliation that will take several years.” Nothing better illustrates Halkin’s utopianism, his total failure to understand implacable Arab hostility, than that phrase, a long process of several years!

Given Halkin’s belief that Israel could not, and should not, retain control of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, one would have expected him to welcome the Oslo Accords of 1993. But in an essay written after the Rabin assassination (“Israel and the Assassination: A Reckoning,” January 1996) he tells us that although he voted for Labor and Rabin in 1992, he has been angry for the last two years – and grown angrier still after the assassination -- at the Labor Party and the Israeli left.

Why should that be, given that he says he still holds to the plan he proposed in 1975? It’s because the Labor Party lied to the public, says Halkin: its 1992 platform ruled out negotiations with the PLO. The Labor Party, says Halkin, was obligated to prepare and then consult public opinion. It should have required the PLO to help change public opinion by declaring a moratorium on terror or repealing the provisions of its Charter calling for Israel’s destruction. And then the government should have called for new elections to ask for a mandate. Since the government had failed to do any of these things, “as the Rabin government continued to keep secret from its own people what its aims were in the peace process, including the borders it planned to insist on and its conception of the fate of the tens of thousands of Jewish settlers living beyond them, much of Israel felt like passengers on a ship that had been hijacked by its own captain and crew, who were now piloting it through a dense fog and mined waters, with the consent of half of those aboard, toward an unrevealed and perhaps calamitous destination.”

Given that every one of his objections to Rabin’s behavior applied with even greater force to Sharon’s actions, Halkin should have been even more offended by Sharon’s “disengagement” from Gaza. Sharon had been elected with a huge majority on a platform that flatly rejected unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (advocated by the rival Labor Party). After he abruptly decided to follow the policy he had denounced, Sharon agreed to subject his “disengagement plan” to a vote by the Likud rank and file and to abide by the result. The plan was decisively defeated on May 2, 1004. Now Sharon reneged on his explicit promise. When members of his cabinet refused to go along, he fired them and brought in the Labor Party. When opponents of disengagement then argued for new elections prior to carrying out a specifically voter-rejected policy, or at least a referendum, Sharon brushed away the demands. In “Does Sharon Have A Plan?” (June 2004) Halkin says Sharon’s problem was that he could not be open about his real plan – “to withdraw not only from the Gaza Strip but also, once construction of its security fence is finished…from most of the West Bank; to evacuate all Jewish settlements beyond the fence.”

Clearly then, in Halkin’s view, the Sharon government, like that of Rabin, was “keeping secret from its own people what its aims were in the peace process, including the borders it planned to insist on and its conception of the fate of the tens of thousands of Jewish settlers living beyond them.” And presumably the public would again have every reason to feel “like passengers on a ship that had been hijacked by its own captain and crew.”

Yet far from assailing Sharon, Halkin champions his eviction of the Gaza settlers. He throws over his own principles with the same reckless abandon that the politicians he earlier criticized threw overboard their promises to the public. In the May 1996 Commentary Halkin outlines his bedrock “conditions” for a Palestinian state—among them, that the PA engage in an all out fight against terror, total and permanent demilitarization, retention of all Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, establishment as a prerequisite for statehood of a “genuine, Western-style democracy…and the same civil freedoms that exist in Israel, Europe and America.”)

But a few years later in “Intifada II” (December 2000) Halkin seems to give up on coexistence: Palestinian Arab society is “so conformist; incapable of distinguishing truth and falsehood or subjecting itself to the slightest degree of self-criticism” that living together with these people was impossible. He now raises the prospect of Israel’s drawing her borders unilaterally.

Typical of Halkin, two years later he was back to the utopian drawing board. In a June 2002 article “Why the Settlements Should Stay,” he declares the settlements “express a deep Jewish imperative that cannot be challenged without calling to question the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine that validates the state of Israel” and reiterates the benefits to both sides if each people lives in its own state and under its own government while together inhabiting one country that is an “indivisible geographic and historic unit and inalienable to the memories of both. What matters most to Jews is not that they rule over an undivided land of Israel, but that they be allowed to be freely at home in it.” Reflecting once again his determined ignorance of Arab goals, Halkin adds: “What matters most to Arabs in Palestine, one trusts, is the same thing."

Fundamentally, as the last sentence so well reveals, Halkin suffers from a failure of moral imagination. He cannot conceive that the Arabs think differently from the way he thinks or the way he wants them to think, no matter how candid they are about their own goals. What possible ground does Halkin have for believing that what matters most to Arabs is not ruling over "Palestine" but being able to be "freely at home in it?" Defying all evidence, Halkin simply "trusts" the Arabs are clones of himself.

In 2004 Halkin is back to unilateral separation and fully embraces Sharon’s “disengagement” scheme. In “Does Sharon Have a Plan” Halkin says that disengagement “is the right policy.” In March 2005 “The Settlers’ Crisis, and Israel’s” Halkin jettisons not only the Gaza communities, but the entire settlement movement, whose vital importance to the Zionist enterprise he had proclaimed a mere three years earlier. He dismisses the Gaza communities breezily, saying “Gaza itself has little strategic value, and even less of a history of Jewish life.” (Halkin is wrong on both counts. As for the first, here is one of innumerable statements by Sharon himself on Gaza’s strategic value: “The Strip is--and was-–a hostile zone, thrusting out of the Sinai area towards Israel’s very heart. It enables any potential enemy to deploy forces or station artillery and rocket launchers of the sort long owned by all terrorist organizations, and certainly by all armies, only 13 km. from Ashkelon, 30 km. from Ashdod port and 55 km. from Gush Dan….So long as Gaza was in Arab hands, it was the most dangerous security element along our frontiers and the chief base for terrorist activity.” Jerusalem Post International edition, Oct. 3, 1992. As to Gaza’s role in Jewish history, while admittedly not central like Judea and Samaria, see Erich Isaac “Gaza Reconsidered” in Outpost, March 2004).

Halkin now rejects the entire settlement enterprise as rooted in “a Kookian faith.” Halkin is referring to the ideology of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Hacohen Kook who saw Zionism as redemptive in its goals and who embraced secular Zionism as willy nilly bringing redemption closer. Whether or not Halkin intends the nasty pun, he dismisses the settlers as a species of false messianists, similar to the followers of the messianic pretender Sabbatai Zevi. No longer do the settlements “express a deep Jewish imperative that cannot be challenged without calling to question the Jewish historical attachment to Palestine that validates the state of Israel” (Halkin’s words back in 2002); now they represent a “messianic bubble” about to burst.

What is particularly striking in this article is the harsh tone. Halkin’s essays usually are notable for the empathy they display for all sides, for Arabs as well as Jews, for the peace camp as well as the settlers. Now he views the intensity of the opposition to the dispossession of “a mere 8,000 people” as “out of all proportion.” Halkin shows no concern that these are people who built their lives here, created flourishing communities and thriving farming economies on what had been empty sand dunes, who were urged to settle and remain by every Israeli government, Labor and Likud alike (each and every government convinced that Israel’s security required a buffer between Egypt and the Gaza Strip). Halkin, whose moral antennae quiver when it comes to Arab rights, sees no problem with Israeli citizens being treated like pawns to be shuffled around, their communities arbitrarily bulldozed to the ground by their own government. To someone of Halkin’s sensibilities, the uprooting of these communities should have seemed like something out of a horror movie.

If it took Halkin three years to throw overboard Israel’s religious and historical rights in Judea and Samaria, it took him only a few weeks to distance himself from the disengagement. In “Israel After Disengagement” (October 2005) Halkin announces it was necessary for the disengagement to take place “for the strategy behind it to be revealed as unworkable.” Why unworkable? Because continuing the process would be too expensive (60,000 settlers rather than 8,000, as Halkin draws the future boundaries, would have to be compensated); more soldiers and police would be needed than Israel could muster to enforce the process; the opposition will be more intense because the settlers of Judea and Samaria are more ideologically “hardcore” than those of Gaza; the Gaza withdrawal had already produced uneasiness in the broad Israeli public upon whom it had dawned that the bulldozers that so easily and quickly destroyed Gush Katif might one day do the same to all of Israel; further massive withdrawals would be too divisive for the country to bear.

Note that Halkin, in speaking of the failure of the strategy, makes no mention of the security consequences for Israel, although it became immediately apparent that what Sharon had forecast back in 1992 was coming to pass: heavy arms have been flooding into Gaza from Egypt; terror groups, including al Qaeda and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (formerly headquartered in Syria) are setting up shop there; rockets have been lobbed at Jewish towns within the old Green Line, a prelude of the long-range missiles and much else to come. Nor does he make any mention of security perils that would flow from the radical withdrawals he contemplates in Judea and Samaria.

Given that Halkin’s bottom line is always that there must be somehow, somewhere, a method to retreat, it turns out that Sharon’s strategy is not so unworkable after all – it simply needs a little tweaking. Halkin comes up with the required “tweak”: the Israeli public will rally around a broad disengagement policy if the United States president makes a statement saying that since Israel is prepared to withdraw from 90% of the West Bank, to the security fence it has built, the U.S. will regard this withdrawal “as constituting full compliance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, and will recognize the new line as Israel’s border with the Palestinian Authority.”

Halkin’s notion that both internal opposition and external threats will melt away if president Bush pronounces these magic words is so breathtakingly silly that this writer must confess that on coming to this passage, she laughed out loud. That the U.S. will endorse borders that remove no more than 60,000 Jewish settlers (out of 250,000 exclusive of East Jerusalem) is scarcely more likely than Halkin’s lion-lying-down-with-the-lamb visions of intertwined Jewish and Arab communities. Indeed Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on October 19 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Israeli construction between East Jerusalem and the nearby suburb of Maaleh Adumim (both of which Halkin assumes remain within Israel) is against Bush administration policy and the U.S. would be cutting financial aid to Israel. Moreover, even if a U.S. President were to make Halkin’s statement, it would have no impact on Arab terror, the Arab determination to destroy Israel, the worldwide delegitimation of Israel, or any of the other problems Israel faces. But for unfathomable reasons, Halkin thinks the U.S. President need only pronounce the magic words – and henceforth, even if Arab irredentism does not vanish and there is not a “total end to terrorism” Israel, he says, “should be able to contain it effectively.”

P. David Hornik writing in Frontpage about this most recent article by Halkin, attributes what he gently calls Halkin’s “unrealistic proposals and dubious claims” to “a sense of panic, possibly founded on guilt toward the Palestinians.” It would be more accurate to say that for the last thirty years Halkin has been in a permanent state of moral panic, unable to admit the possibility that Israel might need to retain any control in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. This explains his long advocated pie-in-the-sky “resolution” of conflicting claims of Jews and Arabs to the Land of Israel. When Halkin finally woke up to the unreality of this fantasy, it was Jewish rights to live in the Land of Israel that he sacrificed. Once deemed non-negotiable by Halkin, these rights were now scorned as Kookian messianism. Halkin’s moral panic that Jews rule over another people has persisted even though Israel has long relinquished control over the Arab population to the Palestinian Authority.

The trouble with Hillel Halkin is not so much Halkin himself. Befuddled though he may be, a fountain of rationalizations for Israeli retreats, he is a much more sympathetic figure than most in the Israeli peace camp. Halkin cares deeply about the survival of Israel. In “After Zionism: Reflections on Israel and the Diaspora” (June 1997) Halkin concludes with a passionate cry: “[I]f Israel should ever go under –and I do not find it inconceivable--I would not want the Diaspora to continue. I would not want there to be any more Jews in the world. It would be too shameful. That is the only word for it that I can think of.”

No, the real trouble is with the editors of both Commentary and the Sun who have made Halkin their chief analyst of Israeli policy. For the last twenty years, Israel’s supporters in this country have counted upon Commentary to provide the most thoughtful discussion of Israel’s options and actions, including sharp criticism of the ill-considered accords with Arafat. The New York Sun, a recent entry in the media market, was welcomed as an antidote to the New York Times, with its relentless bashing of Israel, on the news pages, editorial pages, op-ed pages, cultural pages. It is true, as this essay has made plain, that Commentary has published Halkin for thirty years. But much of what he wrote consisted of literary essays, and during the two decades that Commentary was known for its hard-hitting articles on Israel, Halkin muted his calls for retreat in its pages (he was, after all, unhappy with Oslo, even though his reasons had to do with how it was done, not what was done). Moreover, the vast majority of articles on Israel were by people like David Bar Illan, Douglas Feith, and, clearest and most trenchant of all, Norman Podhoretz.

There are innumerable outlets in this country for head-in-the-sand spokesmen of the Israeli peace camp. Why do we need Commentary and the Sun to provide yet more fatuous fantasies dressed up as political analysis? How does such foolishness get past Commentary editor Neal Kozodoy, famed for his tough editing, his demand for logic and firm reasoning? There is no shortage of first-rate political analysts in Israel. To name only three, Carolyn Glick, Evelyn Gordon and Sarah Honig would illuminate the issues confused and clouded by Halkin.

We can only hope that the editors of Commentary and the Sun come to their senses and offer their readers the sober clear-headed analysis so sorely needed -- and that Commentary, at least, not long ago provided. And by all means, let both continue to publish Halkin’s beautifully crafted book reviews and literary essays -- like “Sailing to Ithaca” in this month’s Commentary.

Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.